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Alexis Wright

Author of Carpentaria

9+ Works 829 Members 25 Reviews 1 Favorited

About the Author

Alexis Wright is the author of Carpentaria which won a Northern Territory Literary Award in the Essay category 2015. She also won a 2015 Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship worth $160,000 over two years for this same title. She made the finalist for the Melbourne Prize for Literature 2015. Her title show more The Swan Book made the shortlist for the 2016 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature in the fiction category. Her collective memoir, Tracker (2017), won the 2018 Stella Prize and 2018 Magarey Medal. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Includes the name: Alexis Wright

Image credit: Photo: Robert Banks

Works by Alexis Wright

Associated Works

Macquarie Pen Anthology of Aboriginal Literature (2008) — Contributor — 57 copies
This All Come Back Now (2022) — Contributor — 26 copies
Skins: Contemporary Indigenous Writing (2000) — Contributor — 19 copies

Tagged

Common Knowledge

Canonical name
Wright, Alexis
Birthdate
1950
Gender
female
Nationality
Australia
Country (for map)
Australia
Birthplace
Cloncurry, Queensland, Australia
Places of residence
Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Occupations
novelist
short-story writer
essayist
researcher
Organizations
University of Western Sydney
Awards and honors
Creative Australia Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature (2023)
Short biography
Alexis Wright is an indigenous Australian, from the Waanyi people.

Members

Reviews

This is a difficult novel to parse, but it is well worth the effort. Wright has done something truly unique here, bridging the "White" Australian world with the "Waanyi" Australian world. Individual sentences will simultaneously check every box of beautifully written Western literary fiction and plop readers into the dream world of Waanyi magical realism. Vocabulary of both, worldviews of both, combine into a saga not only of a family but of a town caught between cultures. There's a lot here; it's long, and it's a slow read. It's also truly immersive. I learned a lot about the unique Australian postcolonial landscape and the Waanyi culture's experience contemplating (white) modernity. I also enjoyed the story.… (more)
 
Flagged
sparemethecensor | 11 other reviews | Jul 17, 2023 |
I actually only got about 50 pages in, but it never captured me. way too much stream of consciousness combined with cultural references that I just couldn't pick up.
 
Flagged
zizabeph | 7 other reviews | May 7, 2023 |
I think I’m an outlier in my opinion of this book, so I won’t say much. I will say the writing is incredibly sloppy in parts: “etching out a living”, “stuck in a grove”, “a slitter of bone” and “Ghandi” are among the pearlers I found in this. Unless it’s done intentionally - and it clearly isn’t - I find this unacceptable in a major work from an award-winning novelist. Apart from that, bugger-all happens in almost 400 pp apart from a great deal of musing about the main character’s relationship with swans. The little that does happen goes unexplained for the most part. I like my magic realism and dystopian novels, and the idea of a dystopian society resulting from the Howard-era Aboriginal Intervention is a promising one, but this book is pointless, poorly-written drivel.… (more)
 
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gjky | 7 other reviews | Apr 9, 2023 |

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Statistics

Works
9
Also by
4
Members
829
Popularity
#30,792
Rating
½ 3.5
Reviews
25
ISBNs
72
Languages
4
Favorited
1

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